


)...watchful...(

by josephina_x



Series: The Triangle Guy [10]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: ...Or is he?, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Bill isn’t Bill, Gen, Identity Issues, Post-Series, Post-Weirdmageddon, See You Next Summer, Two Years Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 10:38:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13188330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephina_x/pseuds/josephina_x
Summary: The triangle settles into the library.





	)...watchful...(

**Author's Note:**

> Fic: )...watchful...(  
> Fandom: Gravity Falls  
> Pairing: n/a  
> Rating: PG-13  
> Spoilers: through the end of the series, and some of the books (Journal #3)  
> Summary: The triangle settles into the library.  
> Disclaimer: Not mine, not for profit.  
> AN: And now we’re getting in to the next phase of things...

\---

Bill settles into the library pretty quickly.

\--By which he means he claimed it for his own that first night, unlocking and relocking the doors behind him, in the only way one should or truly can take over a library: he gets lost in swashbuckling adventures for a solid day and a half before it’s Monday morning and he’s startled out of his reading.

He hears the slam of a door opening, looks around and realizes that he’s actually made himself a book fort.

...Well, crud, not even two days in and he’s already turning into some nerd-geek-bibliophile.

Then again, reading has never been easier for him -- what with no cataracts in his eyes and no need for glasses -- and he _isn’t_ Stanley Pines, so… _why_ should he care what other people might think about this, again?

He still feels vaguely embarrassed and a little bit panicked, though, as he scrambles to get all the books… back onto one of the return-book carts in time? ‘ _\--Yeah, that’ll work!_ ’

He’s a triangular Bill Cipher, and while he might not be trying to take over the world right now (...just this one library, heh…) the rest of the people in town don’t know that. And he’s pretty sure that ‘never minding all that’ will only stretch so far. 

So he grabs the entire book fort’s worth of reading material with his mind and floats it all onto the nearest return cart in one solid batch -- they’re rigid, it’s fine! -- and then _quickly_ floats his own darn self up over the shelves and into the back stacks in the corners of the library, not quite lying down flat against the top of the bookshelves.

And wow, it is not at all dusty up here. --Seriously, do they have some kind of crazy cleaning staff or something? This is, like, cult-like levels of cleanliness up here going on, Bill is pretty sure. Are there cleaning cults that break into libraries at night? Er… Library cults? --Actually, no wait, he knows about those. He’s pretty sure they’re called _’librarians’_ , but he isn’t so sure that part of what they’re paid to _do_ in the libraries is to _clean_ the books and the actual bookcases they are sitting on, let alone the _tops_ of them. That level of cleanliness would probably require some sort of actual, whatchamacallit… a _book-cleaning_ cult or something, maybe?

Oh. Book cults. Huh. ...Y’know, he’s always _wondered_ about all those ‘book clubs’ that seemed to spring up outta nowhere overnight, what with their single books every month and their creepy bright-eyed smiling stares and all that jazz. If they were really supposed to be big-time _readers_ , shouldn’t they be getting through a lot more than one book each month? The slowest that he can ever remember _Sixer_ reading anything was in high school, and _he_ could still get through ten books in three days without breaking a sweat -- and that was even with all that homework junk he cared about taking up his time _and_ the science fair project stuff going on. _Hmmmmmmm…_

Well, that tore it. --’Book clubs’ are going on his list, right under ‘the cops’.

He carefully peers down over the side of the shelf that he’s on and sees the librarians filing in.

He pulls back quickly, because there are at least five people down there, and that is way more people than he’d expected to see working in any library at any one time, let alone one this size. 

He lets out a surprised 'breath' and flips himself over onto his back-face.

‘ _Welp, guess I’m gonna be getting a lot of practice with my second eye and the mentally-floating-other-things bit!_ ’ he thinks, because there’s no way he’s going down there himself and getting himself spotted. He is _not_ getting kicked outta here; no way.

It actually turns out to be a little more challenging than he’d thought, because not only does he find himself having trouble trying to read things from a distance without line-of-sight and without whatever-it-is-that-he-doesn’t-know-yet that helps make things farther away come out crystal-clear looking, but he also finds himself having to pay attention to not just where everybody is -- which ends up being a lot more people than he’d expected to see, also, darn summer reading programs -- but also which directions everybody seems to be looking.

He needs to find each book he wants, and then he needs to find a way to float it up and over to him without anyone seeing the floating book. And both of those things are way harder than just playing around after-hours, out in the open in the middle of the Shack’s museum.

He ends up cheating a little by moving around to different areas as he needs to, to move between the stacks. He floats himself between the backs of bookcases at the far end of the library to switch columns, and then up the sides and onto the tops, with little flat sideways hops, to get across the rows. ...Eh, it gets him where he needs to go.

It also makes him feel a little ninja, even though he’d much rather be a pirate and just _take_.

But that little voice-instinct inside him is telling him ‘better safe than sorry’, and he _really_ doesn’t want to risk getting chased out of the building with a broom by a bunch of angry librarians.

(And, not that he wants to dwell on it much, at all, _ever_ , but in his mind’s eye… he has a vague vision of actually having tried that once, claiming a huge library for his own outright. There had been... a war going on at the time, he thinks? And he’d wanted to be clear about what was his at the time, what he’d _wanted_ to be left alone.)

(But when the invading troops had seen him, in all his glory in the mindscape hanging over them, with fire and brimstone all threatening... they hadn’t listened to him, they hadn’t cowered like they should have, and they hadn’t just set fire to the docks -- _they’d burned the library down_. He’d never gotten to read a single one of the book-scrolls inside it for himself. The best he’d been able to do after that was to give every last one of those barbarian infidels the most terrible screaming nightmares for years… and to whisper in one man in particular’s ear years later that he really should sack that other library over there to give books back to this one.)

So instead of laying claim like a pirate, Bill sneaks and he creeps like a spidery ninja. He makes sure he stays out of everyone’s sight, and...

He makes do.

\---

The third day in, he’s feeling more confident about his ‘avoidant’ skills, so he sneaks out of the back stacks and in a lot closer to where all the people are.

So he’s hanging out on the bookcase centered right behind the information desk in the midddle of the afternoon, paging his way through a copy of ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ (...it was on the ‘reading recommendation list’ on the corkboard over on the far wall, alright?...) -- and man this Poe guy is messed up! -- when it happens.

This nerdy-looking skinny little four-eyed teenaged bookworm makes his cringing way up to the information desk, which has been receiving no traffic all day, and asks the other teenager manning the thing, “Do you have a copy of Lord of the Flies?”

The teen who’s sitting at the information desk, with his feet kicked up onto the desk in a way that reminds Bill a little of Wendy manning the gift shop register counter, drawls out a laconic, “...Why?”

The nerd visibly hesitates. “I need it for a summer reading assignment,” he says, like it’s pulling teeth.

“Uh huh,” says the other teen, not moving. Bill frowns as the teen doesn’t even look away from his phone, on which he’s playing some sort of game or another.

“...Could you please look it up for me?” the nerd tries.

At this the teen glances up briefly. “You can’t look it up yourself?”

The nerd straightens slightly at this. “All the other computers are taken.”

“So wait.” The teen goes back to his phone.

Bill sees the nerd tense a bit. “I can’t,” the nerd admits. “I need to get it now.”

The teen kicks back in his chair and groans, and Bill has to shove himself back for a moment not to be seen. He can practically hear the eyeroll, though, as the teen says, “ _Fine_.”

He hears the teen kick his feet off of the counter, and the creak of the chair. Typing.

Bill peeks over the top edge of the bookcase again, and feels a little relief for the kid, because the screen says there are three copies available for check-out. --Better to get a copy outta the library than have to save up and then shell out the cash for your own copy; save that money for other stuff, Bill figures.

The nerdy kid’s early enough that he’s gonna be able to knock this thing out early, too. Sixer had been like that.

Bill settles back down, right up until he hears a, “Nope, sorry.”

‘ _Wait, what?_ ’ Bill thinks, shoving himself back forward, to look down at them both.

“What?” the nerd says. “You don’t have _any_ copies?”

“Nope. Don’t got any,” the teen at the desk says, clearing the screen and kicking his feet back up on the counter again.

Bill’s eye narrows.

“But…” The nerd looks floored.

As the teen goes back to his phone game, the nerd looks worried, then seems to grow a bit of backbone again, in a way that Sixer used to at that age when his need for something outweighed his hesitation in worrying about what would happen during whatever social interactions he’d need to go through in order to try and get that something.

“Can you at least tell me what section the book is supposed to be in, so I can check for myself?” the nerd asks of him, in an almost hard tone of voice.

“We’re out.”

He sees the nerd pull in a breath and steel himself further. “I know they were supposed to set aside copies for the school--”

“--Well, tough break, we don’t got any,” the teen cuts him off, not even looking up. “Guess you should’ve come in sooner,” he adds, almost sing-song, and that’s just insult to injury.

Bill’s eye narrows further as he watches a lady -- the nerd’s mom? -- come up to the nerd and tap him on the shoulder, then tick her head towards the door and walk away, on her way out. The nerd takes one more second to cast a look back at the unhelpful teen manning the counter, then finally gives up and turns himself, to walk away, shoulders drooping as he goes.

Bill drops his eye to glare down at the teen at the desk.

He could understand it, maybe, if the teen was holding a copy in reserve for himself under the desk, or maybe pulling a prank, laughing and handing over the goods before the nerd has to leave, but… the computer said there are three copies here. Even if the teen is saving a copy or two for a friend, wouldn’t he have pulled them from the shelf and the computer system? That’s just lazy.

‘ _...No_ ,’ Bill decides, ‘ _that’s worse than lazy,_ ’ because this isn’t some bullying over a piece of pleasure-reading, this is for a nerd’s school assignment. And he’d thought some of the trash Crampelter had done to Sixer had been bad, but this... This is worse than stealing a nerd’s homework and tearing it up -- this is keeping them from even doing that homework in the first-place, when they clearly _want_ to do it.

Sixer had never really cared about the grades he got in school; he’d always cared more about the learning. Nerds did things for the learning, and _this jerk was keeping this nerd from learning_.

Bill had had his second eye at least a little bit open while all this was going on, along with his first, so he shoves himself back and rewinds things a bit inside his own mind. He takes a good close-up look at what the screen looked like in his memory, and then glances over at the far end of the library -- he can see the ‘A’ section ‘1’st shelf of the reserves shelves from here. Luckily, nobody’s over there right now, so he can probably get away with this.

He narrows his eye a bit and zeros in on the right book -- Lord of the Flies, yeah? He holds out his hand. He grabs ahold of a copy of that book mentally, and he pulls it forward off of the shelf and then drags it high up into the air, quickly.

He glances back towards the front and realizes that the teen is almost to the metal detectors by the doors.

There’s really no time for this, so he doesn’t bother to do anything special. He just zips the book high up across the ceiling and pulls it straight down faster-than-gravity, to slam the book down into the floor right in front of the kid like it was thrown.

He tries not to wince at the noise it makes, and he sees the kid startle, jump nearly a foot; he sees one of the librarians snap her head over to give the kid a dirty look and a loud “SHH!” too.

He sees the nerd whip his head up and around, about to protest -- that he wasn’t the one who had dropped anything -- and then give up, glaring around to try and figure out who had just gotten him in trouble, and of course he doesn’t see anyone who could have done it. So that kid is all annoyed at the world in general just then for messing with him like this.

...at least, he is, up until he picks up the book, turns it over, and sees what he’s got right there in his hand.

The nerd’s mother is at the front doors, tapping at her watch in exasperation, but the kid waves the book at her, and practically turns and _runs_ over to the checkout counter to get in line.

Bill sees the grin on the kid’s face, and he settles back-face down onto the top of the bookshelf again, with no small satisfaction at a job well done.

But then he thinks of the teen manning the information desk below him, and his eye narrows again. Because...

‘ _Something needs to be done about that._ ’

\---

At the end of the workday, the teen leaves, and Bill doesn’t waste any time.

He zooms down to the desk, grabs a pencil and paper from the ‘suggestion box’, and writes up a few choice words about the actively-unhelpful teenager, before cramming it into the box and zooming back up into the rafters, where he can see a little better. He waits there for a few minutes, for the head librarian to come out like she has the last two days to check the box, like clockwork, at 9pm. He watches, to make sure that the head librarian has pulled the slips out of the box for the day and read them all right there, like she's also done for the last two days, standing in-place, and when she gets to his slip, he can feel her mood shift, like she’s starting to frown.

And he sees her posture straighten as she takes that one slip, pulls it out from the rest, and marches purposefully back towards the librarian’s back lounge, looking like she’s about to ask after what the other librarians have heard about this particular teenager who’s supposed to be on-duty.

And Bill doesn’t feel bad about any of this in the least. He _hopes_ that the brat gets canned. Because that teen isn’t like Wendy at all. Wendy might’ve goofed off a lot at the Shack, and she’d skipped out of work on more than one occasion early, but she’d never complained about the pay-cut she’d got when she did it -- she’d expected it -- and when she _was_ on cashier duty, she actually did her blasted job.

This stupid teenager had been trying to screw up somebody’s education, for no good reason, and he’d been earning money for pay while doing it. That was all kinds of messed-up, in his book. That was… the kind of junk he’d expect to see out of _Gideon Gleeful_ , to be perfectly honest, and Bill didn’t want any sort of Gideon-type in _his_ library!

So no, he doesn’t feel bad about trying to get the dumb teen fired. And if one slip doesn’t work, then he’ll write up another one. And another. And another.

He doubts he’ll even have to lie; he bets he can just watch the teen and write down what he actually does, enough times that it’ll get him fired.

He’s actually looking forward to it.

\---


End file.
